Friday, April 13, 2007

eve and the two world trees

eve and the two world trees

once upon a time the living and the dead were not different. Birth and death were not seen nor feared to be different. The living and the dead moved amongst each other in the same world, traveled the same paths, spoke face to face. The path of death; the milky way, and the path of life; that of the sun were one and the same.

once upon a time god alone created, held the creative powers, knew the craft of creation.

before time began his journey

before Nous began his journey after PsuXe's fleeing ripeness, dripping his seed like the ticking of times clock

before time began his journey after PsuXe, ecosystems created the myriad beings.

before Nous began to spin the sad tale of his awareness of time's passage after PsuXe fled from his awakening, and he gave chase, there was only one creator. She was Earth and she created the myriad beings within herself by letting in the seeds of random flux, letting them enter her own flesh and creating folds around themselves for wombs, letting them play against each other in the game of natural selection. Inviting birth and death into her own flesh generation after generation. But she too had no companion.

before the tale of time spun 'round the world tree

before the path of life and the path of death diverged, there was one world tree of birth and death around which the world revolved in timeless eternal orbit. at equilibrium. Then death, the giver of chance, of mutation, the giver of novelty, offered Eve the forbidden fruit.

And what fruit was it? The pomegranate, convoluted fruit like the cerebral cortex, in the image of mother Earth's folds of flesh around the seeds of creation. So Death offered Eve this convoluted fruit, mass of neurons, the pandora's box dense enough to catch the seeds of random flux herself and wrap wombs of thought about them, give them whole worlds of her own imagining to play in and create ecosystems

once Demeter, giver of live, fertility of decaying mud lost her daughter Persephone to Dis, deep in the dungeons of death. and Persephone ate of the seeds of the pomegranate in his garden in hell

once the daughter of life ate of the seeds of the knowledge of death in death's realm

once the serpent tempted Eve with the power of imagining, simulating,

When the serpent, twined about the one world tree, tempted PsuXe to eat of the fruit of convolution and it lodged into her head and she began to imagine, to dream, for the first time, stories of life and death, in fear she fled the embryonic oneness of her slumber and Nous suddenly separated from her embrace from the oneness of their flesh, for the first time felt bare and cold and felt the separateness of his flesh and yearned for the touch of her and he chased after her luscious ripeness and both of them running round the world tree, he, dripping his seeds and she naming them

and the world tree split with them and the tree of the making of good and evil split off from the tree of the wholeness of birth and death and the tree of making leaned toward their chase and slowly began its wobble about the world axis of the wholeness of birth and death

and thus the sun's path around that tree of knowledge separated from the path of consort with the dead, leaving the burnt milky way in its memory. And the path of the sun, the path of life no longer turned round the world axis but about that tilting one, and the sun sometimes dipped too low and sometimes soared too high and forced the changing of seasons into dry summers and cold deathly winters and with him the lord of the four quarters was now ever slowly shifting houses and the world order was ever doomed to endless repetition of binge and collapse of empire.

No longer could the people travel freely along the path of the dead and the path of the living. The living people thirsted to see their dead companions face to face, and the dead thirsted for the living, and as the memory of their consort with each other faded, they created gods and monsters.

[ its not the sun's path of life vs the milky way's path of the dead, but the sun god's judgment making, making good/evil vs the tao, the path of the wholeness of birthing/dying]

[ but there are two creation stories here. One of mind's separation from soul along their dark journey lost in the caverns of man's winding brain, and the prior one of the creation of time itself from the eternal orbit of gravity. Or... once upon a time the axis of the globe of Earth did tilt, but man's wakening to sin did not cause it. Nor did man's wakening to sin cause the invitation of sin into the world at large. Three tasks: to tell the tale of the birth of time and the creative powers of the universe; to tell the tale of the birth of mankind's lonely journey to become a creator in the convoluted caverns of his brain; to decide whether these two tales are related at all. can mankind's story be an image for the story of the cosmos? Can the shapes and cycles and imperfections of the cosmos be an image for the story of mankind? Does mankind belong to this Earth, or was he breathed into it by a god totally alien to these stories?]

[but more. at some point i tell of the birth of nous/time out of the eternal orbit of Cosmos. but that's wrong. birth of nous/time is something that occurred in H. sapiens history, or in each of our own awakening to consciousness. outside of our stories, lie Kosmos, and the second law of thermodynamics always existed. evolution by a process of iteration in unique time moments, WAY off of the eternal manifold has existed since there was energy flow. Do you mean AFTER the big bang, i.e. before that, KOSMOS was a singularity, not a multiplicity of places and thus there WAS NO ENERGY FLOW and thus THERE WAS NO TIME FLOW? hmmm...

anyway we created this idea of a paradise on the smooth eternal manifold AFTER our conscious time sense awoke. THERE IS NO REAL LIFE FOR US ON THE ETERNAL SMOOTH MANIFOLD, THERE CAN BE NO HUMAN EXPERIENCE AT THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM.]

when Eve was offered the fruit of convolution and began to dream myriad beings herself, the lone creator beheld her and said, "Lo, she has become as...". No, the lone creator said no such thing. We created such stories, the first creator created only frogs and feathers and such

When PsuXe, the changing luscious fertile conceiving and hellish frightening aborting moon sparked Nous' imagination when she taught him to tell time and to sit under the moonlit night by the fire and spin tales to narrate eternal knowledge into tales of time

THE HELL SHE DID, SHE TAUGHT HIM TO HUDDLE BY THE FIRE AND KNOW FEAR.

just after the beginning of time, when Eve stole the pomegranate of ecosystem from the tree and gave it to man, he did not at all understand its nature. He feared not being able to consort with the dead. He feared the flight of PsuXe, he feared being alone.

the cavern he lived in grew large. The cavern of mind was empty with echoes. the vault of sky and mind was far away and every time man tried to apprehend those walls, they, being his very apprehension itself, swelled and grew more distant still.

When man was given the craft of creation he was so ignorant of its ways. He no longer remembered the connection of birth and death. He was ignorant of the role of chance as the source for all new ideas. He was ignorant of the craft of trial and error of natural selection on those ideas to hone them down.

man was so busy chasing with mind PsuXe's luscious ass that he lost track of the way of interlinking cycles of cause and effect of ecosystems at far from equilibrium and knew only how to spin... an orbital cycle at equilibrium or a linear narration of history (that's not equilibrium. but it ain't complex links of cause and effect either.)... along the cold black manifold of space

it was a long journey to the knowledge of the craft of creation

longing for that life before time, that life before 'before', that life of union between Nous and PsuXe, man at first decided that all creation occurred in the past, before time. He decided all new ideas, in reality, gifts of the random flux in time, were but memories of the fullness of all knowledge from his eternal embryonic existence before time. So ignorant about creation was he that he thought that all there is and that will be was held in embryo in the mind of god, a very large idea he created from his very large fear.

man did not even know about creation, the vast limitless flux of miracles and myriad interacting womb beings who nurtured and traded them

so new was this chasing mind of his in PsuXe's convoluted caverns of cerebral networks that he spun his own story of what creation was. Man created an image of creation after his own meagre single minded chasing after PsuXe's flight.

Creation went on right before his eyes but he set his eyes upon the image he created of creation and chased after it in fear of the fleshy fertile grub springing forth decaying mass of life and death that was himself.

it was too much, too fast, for eve to swallow the globe of the creator Earth, to swallow the birthing/dying creative brain which could then imagine her own birthing/dying

mankind was still way too small to handle the knowledge of himself as this mass of flesh, giving itself to the random flux alternately birthing himselves into the myriad beings and killing himselves repeatedly to hone those beings down into creation.

the newborn homunculus of tiny man born suddenly into the knowledge, into the cavern of ten thousand billion neurons, this fragile newborn body born into the knowledge that ten pounds of his own flesh can be flesh to the creation and destruction of worlds in imagination. This man thinking himself alone on all the face of this huge Earth of his wanderings, capable of this

thrust into the theatre of such a depth that he has been lost in its convolutions for hundreds of thousands of years, and the longer he journeys, the more convoluted this theatre becomes and the more convoluted the theatre the more earnestly he creates stories to combat it. He became so preoccupied with his own falling into this inner cavern that he forgot, then shunned the first creator, Earth.

forgetting the reality of this fleshy muddy birthing dying Earth that he is, being so lost in, so invested in, this hundred thousand year long drama that he has created solely out of ideas, so huge and delicate this construct of ideas has become, that the threat of the reality of birthing dying flesh has brought on a fear so huge as to create the beast satan...

the mind of man and the body of man were not meant to come together so quickly in the course of evolution!

mankind was given the ability to imagine his own creation and destruction when he was yet so young. He has been having nightmares ever since. nightmares played out in a theatre so complex and convoluted that it is easier to imagine them more real than the whole Earth which in reality contains him and created him.

[to watch a movie like "End Of Days"...] with the hugeness of forces imagined about a single human being wrapped up with the creation of sin in the world. that we feel ourselves responsible for the creation of sin in this whole six trillion trillion ton convecting globe of four billion years of geological history and evolution of the myriad species...

What happened in the brain of man, that out of fear he is compelled to create an image of a winged gargoyle bat serpent with a head out of the depths of the seas living in the center of the Earth, living under six trillion trillion tons of gyrating molten rock and bursting forth out of his slumber to burst up through the floor of a cathedral and to ravish a nubile young virgin? What fears bring up this horror? What forces within myself brings up such fear to require the destruction of a whole world?

need to tell it thus: all occurrences of mention of "man" must be changed to "myself". can only tell this story from self knowledge. surely i contain those same primeval colossal fears which can create such a satan monster to destroy the world? Surely, my imagination is so rich that thirty seven years full of moments of this imagination feels as rich as the creation of a whole world? And I am slowly destroying it through my own frailty? does that not contain a nightmare? Can any story or myth be able to build up within me the horror and suspense of thirty seven long years full of moment after moment of enticement and failure to create? The horror of my death which i can well imagine as the death of all my ability to experience and remember all I have experienced and imagined. my death will destroy worlds! for me, it will destroy all the people i love and this whole earth that i love. for all i know, when i die, it all goes! And each moment of failure is killing me. or, each moment that i fail to be here now and experience those around me,

and added to all this is the power of mankind in his real ecosystem. Homo sapiens, the aggressive team player, running from so HUGE a fear is devouring his first creator Earth! We are now capable of fucking with her climate, we are now capable of blasting her surface into another mass extinction. if we can do this, and learn to last ourselves a few more centuries we will surely build up the machines to reproduce her or destroy her totally. We certainly did in reality become as God, the first creator. This ecosystem of Earth has reproduced herself, birthed six billion little gods in her belly. and how will it play out? Why do we even have so much trouble finding our real mother? How long will it take? will we learn wisdom from her in time? will we be as seed to her and spread her life to other planets before we destroy our only body?

just as well man should fear armageddon and take responsibility for it! We are capable. Yes, with our birth, not that sin came into the world, but that a race of young gods came into the world

well first creator Earth always had capability within herself to get out of kilter and destroy the whole ecosystem, no? Do we know enough about her to say that she is wise enough to sustain harmony, a kind of sloppy gaia argument, and that we are not wise enough to create properly? is the Birth of Homo sapiens any more dangerous and earth shattering as any other event on the face of Earth has been?

we don't know yet

but we can imagine it possible...

this needs a form and boundaries. How much of the story to tell.

Once upon a time, mankind were many hairy pawns in Earth's huge theatre of creation. Each ape a pawn, a question, a trial, many errors, in Nature's give and take to discover what it took to act the next scene. Men and woman were given each their scripts to play out, unquestioning, how could they question or change the scripts? No way to see the whole world, no way to imagine all the characters at once. The only character imaginable to animals was itself.

Then the pace of play picked up.

The scripts weren't always handed out

improvisation was necessary, but how?

Slowly an improvisatory organ evolved in the skull of mankind

and how it pained the woman to give birth to its great girth

mankind learned to write the script as he went along

They didn't know what the hell they were doing, these little apes

with swolen heads, but they sensed the caverns growing up there

up there became a theatre in itself

The vault of the stage no longer the clear blue sky and cold black night, but a nebulous cavern inside with no boundaries?

and for a while

mankind got lost in it, he was no longer in the original play of forest and stream and savannah,

no longer learned his lines in the original play.

the other players were very distraught, men and woman no longer responded correctly

in fact this new ape began tearing the original world theatre down in their blind sleep walking as they dreamed in their own private theatres

God dam that each had such a huge theatre in his own head, he could very well Goddamit, write a whole play and play all the parts in an hour,

in an hour, a play that took the one world theatre millennia to run.

The other myriad beings were totally bewildered, couldn't keep up.

After awhile these naked apes saw that they were pretty hot stuff, not understanding why, but it was obvious to see, they knew that their numbers were on the rise, their stench called to high heavens... either that or their atrocious farming practices denuding the hillsides, caused the gods to rain down floods down the mountains submerging their port settlements in slime

after awhile they could predict how the gods moved the heavens

after a while they could feel their own existences achingly alone...

and so, lacking hubris, they lost respect for the original imaginer of plays. The landscape itself around them, the eons it took to do the imagining, way back into geological time. The land meant nothing to these new naked silly people. They at least felt a closer affinity to the vault at night, it was easier to imagine it limitless and frightening as their own head vaults. The mind vault was certainly NOT a sunny Blue meadow.

Each man and woman's mind theatre being selfcontained, they thirsted for real company in that cavernous hall. A lover. A God. But none were able to enter. It dawned on the folk of these early cities that they used to have communion in a larger play, with each other, with the animals even, with the creative powers of Earth. It dawned on these folk that they were expelled from communion and had to find a way within

God! did they dig inwards, fasting in deserts alone for a decade, watching their own breath one after another till time itself expired, spinning elaborate mathematical constructs floating in the middle of ones own skull vault.

What an awful mess. It was clear that men or at least a company of them could create what took their first mother eons to come up with. Even to create things that were never before seen on the face of the earth. Atom bombs, liquid crystal displays, lasers, ring dings...

And their songs... Never had there been heard on the face of the Earth songs so sinuously long and achingly beautiful, or horrifying... Songs more complex then the routes the planets took amongst the fixed posts of the heavens.

And the more they searched, the more alone they felt. No, their cousins, the chimpanzee and gorilla really couldn't stitch keen thought together in those lengthy sentences our children learn with ease. They have even taken to searching the seas for companions. Did the whales really sing? They had hunted whales since their time began, always seafarers, and yet rarely suspected whales of yarn spinning play. yet lately it is seeming possible to them, perhaps before it's too late and not to hunt the last one.

But so many millennia of pride as the brand new gods on the face of this earth. Would mankind be willing to accept an equal to share a finite planet.?

3 comments:

You have thot quite a lot. You have quite a lot of thot. I read through it and felt in a dream state. Funny you used the phrase "Skull of Mankind"; that's my nickname at http://www.myspace.com/skullofman .

I love the telling of the story/ies multiple times in multiple ways. After your post on my blog today, I was thinking something akin to this: We invent and blue-green algae invent too. Creativity seems to be part of the reason (or essence, or whatever word you want to use) for/of the universe. But algae and even chimpanzees create slowly, evolve in limited steps.

In creating us, on the other hand, in creating us with self-awareness, the universe created a creator that could go off in myriad and unpredictable directions, rapidly, simultaneously. Seen that way, we're part of the universe's push toward creativity and inventiveness, toward playing out comboinations and permutations.

We are indeed evolving/creating so fast that we could destroy ourselves/our home/the earth from which we evolved. It's only because of that same self-awareness that we think that's a problem... In the grand scale of things I suppose it would be barely a hiccup.